Let's set the scene. You're on your way to a unity
rally. This is gonna be an event celebrating the diversity of
our human existence. You're gonna hear positive
messages talking about how we are each different and come from different
backgrounds, and yet this diversity makes us more beautiful in
the whole and strengthens all of us. Your presence at the
rally should be an important witness towards unity.
It's surprising then that the entrance to the rally is flanked
by swastikas and scores of angry white men.
What do you do in the moment? Do you run through? Turn
around? Or do you confront them?
This is Compass Finding Spirituality in the Everyday. And in
this episode, we're talking with Reverend Neelley Hicks, who chose
to confront the Nazis heckling Nashville, Tennessee's
unity rally in 2024. Neelley ended up on the front
page of the local paper in a photo. They're talking with men
wearing nazi paraphernalia and carrying swastika
flags. The picture was actually picked up by several global news
organizations. Now Neelley and I volunteer at the
same church. It's a church known for taking stands on issues of
equality and justice. So we could assume that though Neelley
looks calm in the picture, she was there to confront hate. And
that was the truth truth of it. But remaining calm and exuding a warmth of
compassion is part of who Neelley is and is part of what makes this such
a remarkable story. So let's get the full story. I'm
Ryan Dunn,
and we're talking about addressing trauma and fostering love
over hate on compass.
Well, Neelley, of all the things that we could be having a
podcast conversation about, I'm a little surprised that it's Nazis, but,
here we are in this day and age and,
having to, rehash what begin many of us would hope
would be a dead topic. But, as the, you know, the
newspaper taught us a few weeks ago, it is not a dev
topic. You were in the paper.
Congratulations. Thanks. It's not something that I I seek after to have
my Right. My photograph on the front page
of a paper, but, you know, there it was. Yeah.
And especially in the context that that it was. I I understand that
you've had to do some rereporting or sharing
about the context around the the paper that appear
or around the photo that appeared in the Tennesseean? Can you explain
what you were doing? Yeah. Yeah. So, a
couple of weeks ago, there was a unity rally in Nashville,
and it was focused on bringing support around,
basically unity so that people could get out
and show that love is stronger than hate here in
Nashville. And the reason why that happened was
because Neo Nazis showed up, and they had been
around for, I guess, a couple of weeks. And it wasn't their first time here
either. But people decided we're gonna come
out together and show unity and love. And
I was invited by a friend of mine to go, and I knew that
she had individually received hate mail,
anti Semitic hate mail in her driveway.
And, you know, that's what they've been doing for the last few years,
actually, throwing anti Semitic flyers and
pamphlets out in the night, you know,
where it's safe for them, to drive down the street and throw
these bags out with anti Semitic literature
into driveways. And so I knew she had
received that. She is Jewish, and I wanted to
show up for her. And so I was waiting for her,
and it was while I was waiting that the
the Neo Nazis showed up. What they say is that they do not wanna be
called Neo Nazis. They wanna be called Nazis.
They are actual Nazis. That's what their branding
is. But, when I saw them walk up,
I Ryan, honestly, it was not something I had
planned. I my feet took me to
them. And I walked up,
and the first person whose eyes met
mine, I asked the question, how does it feel to
have so much anger in your heart? And
that started a conversation, and it
was an insightful conversation. So you didn't really have a
plan of what you were doing when you approached?
No. I did not. I mean, you know,
I always kinda create these mind scripts of
if I come face to face with so and so, I'm gonna say this, and
I'm gonna say that. And I had run through with with some of that in
my mind. But I think probably at the heart of the question that I asked
was this concept, which is a trauma informed
concept around not saying, what's wrong with
you, but saying, what happened to you?
And that when we ask that question, we understand,
like, okay. How did this happen? And
so that was probably really influencing the way that I
handled that conversation. So with that question then, what response did
you get? Yeah. It was it was interesting
because the person I was talking with, the guy with
the mohawk and swastika on his
t shirt said, I'm not like this always or I'm not like
this all of the time. So, you know, that
was a greater answer than I expected.
And so I started asking him more about,
well okay. So when did this start for you?
And he said about 5 years ago. And then
he corrected himself and said it was during the pandemic.
And then it led to him talking about how his
neighborhood had changed. He lives in Colorado. He
told me that. And Mexicans, which I don't know if
they're Mexican or not, but, essentially, Hispanic
immigrants had moved into his neighborhood. And he
said, and why do you think they come here? And
I said, well, I know my ancestors came from
Ireland because they wanted a better life. And he
said, yeah. Well, why don't they why can't they stay in their
own country and make things better there? And so
we continued talking about that. I
also asked him if he was Christian, if he considered
himself Christian because the rise of Christian
nationalism is so
abhorrent to the Christian faith. Like, Christian
nationalism is the same as Islamic terrorism.
It's like they're both, can I say, bastardizing
the religion from which they represent? It's like, it's
not really the religion either time. But I
wanted to ask that question. Are you
Christian or consider yourself to be? And he he wavered in
his response. And I said, well, you know,
Jesus is Jewish. Right? Or Jesus
was Jewish. And, oh my gosh,
Ryan. It was crazy because I didn't even know that the
other guys were totally listening to this conversation. But
all of just all of them just, you know,
jumped on me to say, no. He wasn't, and neither
was Abraham or Isaac or any of them.
So I asked them, where do you get your biblical
history or knowledge from? And,
one of the guys in the back said there was a bible that came
out during the civil war or around that
time. So I looked that up, and it's true
that slaveholders redacted the
bible for their purpose to keep slaves
in check and in line. And so while
I've not read that bible, I am looking more into
it because I think that, you know, we just
never know when one thing is done for one purpose.
Like, at that point, those slaveholders wanted to
have justification for oppressing people.
And then here we are 2024, people are
still referencing that version of the
bible to justify their oppression of other
people. So I learned a lot, Ryan.
Over the course of your conversation, did you ever get
an impression as to why they were targeting this
area? Like, we we've had these conversations in Nashville
before. I'm not sure if this stuff is happening across the
country as much as it's happening here. Maybe I'm just heightened
aware height I have a heightened awareness because we are here
in Nashville, but the guy you talked to is from
Colorado. Why was he here? Yeah. You know, one question
that I would have liked to have asked is who funded your
trip? Because
so many times, people who are,
you know, out there with perhaps without enough income
or, you know, maybe they don't have a job, maybe they're kind of a
misfit in community, Those are the people who are
vulnerable and might be sought after to go and
do something like this. So I did not get to
ask that question. So I don't have a,
a definite answer on why they came here. But
one thing that I think of are the
things that Nashville has become more known for.
And it's not the tourism.
It's not the, you know, the fun
times and the beautiful sights here, but we
think about some of the people who are
so rampantly racist
and just just oppressive people.
And their voices have become
amplified, unfortunately, in ways that I
think gives permission to others to come here.
There has also been a gas station, out
on Ashland City Highway that was cited by the Southern
Poverty Law Center as offering hand to hand
combat, in their secret
room upstairs, preparing for
maybe a race war or some kind of war in this nation.
So these things create an atmosphere where
people do feel invited here and, you
know, as if they are going to find more similar
mindsets here. I think, you know, I'm really proud
that we that the unity rally happened because there
were more people there than them who stood
outside the gate. And, actually, in one of the
photographs, the the lead guy was just
kind of a carnival barker. You know, he was just out
there. Nazi organizer. Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. The lead Nazi.
And he was in the news quite a bit. But,
what I saw in him was somebody who he's living in
the ego level of being. All that
matters to him is the attention that he gets,
and he's getting it. But in one photograph,
he was actually climbing the fence or
standing with his face pushed into the fence, and he looked like an
animal. And it's it's really
tragic that somebody
would let their life be diminished
in that way because none of us start out hating
like this. And it's
just I think that's a really pathetic way to
live. So you had mentioned that the the person
you were speaking with said that he is not like that all
the time. And did he give an indication
on, you know, what has changed for him? So we don't
start out hating like this. We heard a little bit about his
his neighborhood having changed, but did
he say that there was something more to that? Was there a reason why he
was so resentful that there were different looking people in his neighborhood?
He did not, and I really regret that I did not
get his full name and contact information because I
would love to do a follow-up interview with him. And I've actually searched
for him online, and I can't find anything.
But because those are the questions that need to be asked.
And we know that this it to
me, it's like this gang mentality. You know,
gangs thrive because people who don't
have what they need to live happy, healthy
lives, they get taken in. They become vulnerable, and they get
taken in by somebody else. And we see this in
places where I work in Africa that simply by
giving young boys bread
that, you know, some kind of, leader,
ringleader will then take them in, care for
them, and then have them do horrendous
things on their behalf. So the same mentality
that's there in Africa, it's it's within all humanity.
Right? People look for those who are vulnerable. And
then when people find a group where they feel
like they do fit in, they find that sense of belonging,
then they go with the group. It's the
peer pressure at maybe at first, and then it
becomes just a way of life. What's kinda striking to me in looking
through the photos that
the man who you had a conversation with did not
have his face covered. He's very recognizable just as he described. If
you look at these photos, you're gonna see who who it is that you're talking
about. Mhmm. Everybody else though, just about everybody
else seems to have some sort of of face covering,
which is strange to me that you would show up in this public place to
make this public declaration and yet hide
a a bit of yourself like that. Did you get an impression at
all that there was a bit of, like to me, it suggests that
maybe they feel a little bit ashamed about what they're doing. Did did that
come across in your conversation at all? It did not.
But, I mean, there was one man who was an older man. I
mean, maybe, like, my age. And he
had on Okay. So 32. Skeleton mask or something.
Mhmm. And he was one who
put me down for being, you know, a
clergy woman. So but I
think, if I look to to the other
pictures of what's happened here in Nashville, there was
a bigger march with more people walking down the
street with mask on. And it
you know, when I was 3 years old, my dad was
transferred from the from to Greenville, Mississippi.
The family moved there because of the Klan. My dad was
with the FBI. And so one
of the things that, they practiced at that
time was outing the people who were
Klansmen at their business
luncheons. The FBI would go and
flash their badge and say something about where they were.
So it was the outing them and then that peer pressure, at
least in part, from other businessmen,
which it was businessmen at the time,
that would have at least, you know,
taken them out for a while.
Hate is hate, and it lives on. It,
it a gross comparison. But to think
about hate as if it were a
cockroach is an apt
description because a cockroach can get in
through any tiny crevice.
Its tentacles peep through. And before you
know it, not only do you have 1, you have
2 and 10 and a 100.
And with hate, I think we let
ourselves we let those crevices grow in our
lives when we entertain
hateful things. We laugh at someone. We put down
someone. We then get with other people who
put down the same individual. Then we feel better
about ourselves temporarily.
And so hate is something that Christians
really need to guard our hearts against. And we think about, you know,
we are to guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. That's what
we're called to do. Because I was getting
I would be talking with Joey, the guy with the mohawk,
and then the lead guy, who I call the carnival barker,
he would come up and start throwing literature in my face and saying
things, horrendous things to me. So I turn around and talk to
him. Some of that, I can't repeat, what
he said nor what I said. I didn't say anything in hate, but I
did say things I would not wanna repeat here. But
I told him, do you feel like you can
only be all that you are if you are
putting down somebody else? And
he would not he his armor
was all the way up. Whereas with Joey,
I could actually look in his eyes and talk with
him. Yeah. It's the mask thing,
maybe it does protect them against losing their jobs. We
know January 6 people, when their faces were uncovered,
many of them lost their jobs. So here we
are today, and we've
got we've got Nazis in Nashville. Well, I think about carnival
Barker there. If I'm it's pretty easy
to pick him out as well, you know, even though I wasn't there, but he
didn't have a mask on when he was wearing big sunglasses. Although it's still
not all that tough, you know, if you knew this person in real life to
say that's him for sure. So
I don't know. Still that is is curious to me, like, why he felt like
he needed to cover up with with sunglasses. Something's
going on there. But Something's going on. And when I tried to look into his
eyes, the glasses were dark enough where I couldn't really see them.
Mhmm. And I almost asked him to take them off. It wasn't
that right, but I didn't. Well, there's other pictures of him indoors, and he's
still wearing the sunglasses. So Yeah. They're on for a reason. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, you didn't set out that day to confront
Nazis. You sent out to go to a a a
unity rally. What was the mood inside the unity
rally like? Oh, it was beautiful.
There was singing. There was live music. There was dancing,
people hugging each other. I think it
really did show that Nashville is so much better than this.
And the mayor of Nashville, Freddie O'Connell,
spoke and then also reverend Steven
Handy, who's United Methodist pastor among others.
And it was it was powerful. I
think also, you know, when I
look at the unity that is needed to overcome something like
this, it was present that day, and it
doesn't need to just be a 1 hour thing
once in a while in Nashville. If we cannot work
together against Nazis, oh my
gosh. We seriously have problems. We need to be working
across faith lines, across,
racial, socioeconomic, because when we come
together and put our voices together for good, we
far outweigh those voices of hate.
So we're stronger together. And I think that that
rally was just a glimpse into what how we
could be living together here. Do you feel like the presence outside
impacted anything that went on inside the rally?
It didn't, because, I mean, the music and
everything drowned out their voices. So, they
were yelling obscene things. And, well, the carnival
barker was. And but it didn't it
didn't disrupt anything. I think there
is that ongoing tension in
among Jewish people that something could happen
anytime because it's so ingrained in their history
Mhmm. With the holocaust, before the holocaust, like all of the
different ways that Jewish people have been oppressed. And, yet
they are our faith ancestors. And so there
is an obligation to care for them. There's faith
obligation to care for anyone who is, yeah,
the human family because we're all one. But
I don't think that we can just forsake our
our past, our his our faith
ancestors. And I think that that's what we've
done. I think, also, some people might be concerned
because they fear since the war in
Gaza that showing support for
Jewish people looks like you support the war in Gaza.
And I'm more of a nuanced
kind of thinker. I don't just have
that binary switch where it's like, I'm not gonna be with Jewish
people because I don't agree with the war. Because people
in other parts of the world could be totally against America
for certain things it does. Well and they
are. But I don't think that way. And
so, yes, I could show up at that rally and be there and
support my friends who many of them also
are against that war. But, you know, it did make me
wonder. There was a great crowd there, but it did make me wonder
if there would have been more people had the war
not gone this way
after the initial, terrorist attack. You've
helped well, you've developed the the triumph over
trauma program and somebody who's showing up to a
unity rally and is all
of a sudden confronted with signs of hate,
swastikas, that can be a traumatizing event.
How do we, who maybe aren't quite as
directly affected, how do we help others kind of process
that trauma from harassment? Or, you know, if you got one of
these bags in your driveway, like, how can we express
a a sense of care and togetherness with people?
Yeah. That's a great question. And the triumph over
trauma work really equips volunteers to be
to understand how trauma affects the body and
how to recognize signs of it, how to recognize triggers
in ourselves and others, and then how to
deescalate or self regulate so that
we become, more mindful. And,
you know, we when we get triggered, we go into an emotional mindset.
And that's not always the best place to
to do to think straight.
And so that work really focuses on
when we lean into emotions and lean into
reason, those 2 intersect
emotions and the rational mind into a
wise mind. And that state of being is the
place where we can be our best from because we're
honoring our emotions. We also have the ability to think straight and
plan productively. But
for those who are simply wanting to know, like, how do you
support someone, I think showing
up for them, being there When they ask you to
be at a unity rally or something, go.
Make that your priority. Just physically be there. You don't have to go
talk to Nazis like I did. Just go and sit with them. Be
with them. You know, go to different events
that include different people from your community. I've
also been to an event recently at the mosque here in
Nashville that was on the war in Gaza. And so
also being with people there who were losing family
members and friends who live in that part of world.
So showing up physically is the best thing.
If we can't do that, then being able to call them and
listen, to be able to say, how is it
how are you feeling today? How's it with your soul right now?
And not trying to solve their
problems, but to simply be there and listen.
I think also, when we do go
into these darker spaces with people,
we have to care for ourselves more deeply afterwards.
And so, like, for myself, there's been a lot of
things that I've gone through throughout my life where afterwards, I just
felt so awful. And
the Nazi conversation wasn't actually one of those times,
but, but we do have to be sensitive to
how we are feeling. Because sometimes
when a person starts talking about their trauma,
what it does is it hits a
bruise within us as something that's
not healed.
It's not just that I can't listen to this
person. It's that person is touching
something within me that is not well.
And when that happens, being able to sit with ourselves
and provide loving touch to ourselves.
If sometimes we feel pain in our chest, we have
certain bad thoughts. Sometimes we have it in our
gut. That's where I feel my pain,
emotional pain most of the time. Being able to simply
place a hand over that space and breathe
deeply. Oxygen to the brain is
what we need. And often when we get triggered,
we breathe more and more shallow when that's the
time that we need to stop and just breathe
deeply because we need the oxygen to flow
to our brain so that we can think straight and think with
a wise mind. Thank you so much for for sharing the insight with
us. Do you have one more question for you, Neelley? As you
think about the events of the Unity Rally
Day, as you reflect back upon them,
do you feel like you're carrying a lesson away, or is there
something that you're going to remember going forward based upon the events of that
day? Yeah. It has oh,
there's so many things, Ryan. There's so many things. I think,
all of the different things that they said to me are
things that I'm I'm making note of.
I'm also researching hate because
hate you know, trauma let me get back to trauma for a
second because mental illness is something that has been
so stigmatized in this country. The
science behind trauma shows that when we go
through a bad experience, our bodies record
that physically. It's in our central nervous systems.
And so to me, that is helping to destigmatize
mental illness into more of a physical,
emotional, and spiritual, holistic way
of looking at people and the needs that they have.
With hate, it also has felt
so abstract, and it continues to feel abstract
that there are people who are doing research on the
neuroscience of hate. And so that's something else
that I'm looking into because there are shifted
patterns in the brain that happen when
people hate, that sometimes come out of this
us versus them mentality. And so
I think that the up close conversation that I had with
them is something that will be
in my mind as I study these
other things. And then I'm going to be producing
a 3, 3 episode or
3, not episode, but,
series. 3 articles. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.
For United Methodist News Service, and we'll
dive more deeply into these things there. Well, Neelley, thanks for sharing
this story once again. You shared it very well on your on your
own podcast, Women Rise. And I
encourage people who want to hear a little bit more of this story and some
of the specific things that were said to check out that episode as well. And
we'll definitely link up the articles that you're sharing with the News
once we, have those on our web page. So thank you so
much. Thank you so much, Ryan. Thanks again
for joining us on Compass. A couple other episodes to
explore include episode 133 called cultivating
empathy in polarized times. That was with John Pavlovitz. And
episode 110, linking love and justice with Otis
Moss the third. Compass is a production of United Methodist
communications. More episodes and show notes are
available at umc.org/compass.
New episodes come out every other Wednesday. So we'll talk again in
2 weeks.